A Short Blog About a Mountain

In June 2007 Anne and I flew to Seattle for a family gathering. We arrived at the airport around ten or eleven at night, rented a car, and headed down I-5 to find our motel. As I was driving and looking for road signs, I saw something above the highway that took my breath away—a huge white shape with a pinkish hue that demanded my attention and overpowered the landscape. I knew rationally that I was looking at Mt. Rainier. I knew that the northwest was famous for these old volcanoes that randomly dwarf the Cascades and their foothills. I also knew that we were there when the nights were shortest and that the mountain was reflecting a far off sunset.

So much for knowledge. Emotionally I was in a different place. I have to call my primary feeling fear. The thing was too big, too close, too smothering, too terribly out of place to someone who lived most of his life near the Appalachians. At the same time, I realized I was seeing something incredibly beautiful. I was drawn to it. It bordered on something personal, beyond rock and snow. There should have been a voice, or music.

OK. If you know me, you’re probably afraid I’ve imbibed to much Tolkien. But stay with me. What I realized then, and have again since, is that terror and beauty are not opposites; they are manifestations of the same experience, or of the same ultimate reality, of God; and it is the constant need of fallen humanity to deprive Him of both, to make Him tame and ugly.

God is to feared because He is immutable, unbending in His requirement that we keep His law, “who will by no means clear the guilty,” and who offers us forgiveness only because He meets the demands of His own justice, which never wavers. This is fear that arises out of the relationship of God and man.

But there is another reason we fear God. We understand that beauty is the quality that anything possesses as it moves toward its own ideal or its own perfection. The more something fulfills its purpose and becomes what it was meant to be, the more beautiful it is. God is the completely beautiful because He is completely perfect. That beauty is fearful because it uncovers our imperfection, but for those who love God, to behold the Terrible Beauty means to be transformed by it, to become what we were meant to be.